[R&F] Preferred City Distances

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

What's your preferred distances between cities, and boundary geometric patters you like to use?

Mine is this

Six by six, no overlapping boundaries within an empire. I might raze enemy cities that doesn't follow this pattern even though it usually incurs warmonger penalty (or Grievances in GS). unless there's problems with freshwater.
What's yours? Do you like to build a metropolis that exploits maximum possible city radius or closely packed small towns like what AI usually does?

 

[WackenOpenAir]

Depends on your goals.
If you are focusing on winning asap, you can expect to win somewhere between turn 100 and 200. The last 50 turns are not that important since there is little investment horizon remaining, so you want to have your cities to grow freely until turn 100 or so. (size 7ish) you also don't want a lot of districts because you only need those that support your victory condition as well as a few commercials, 1-2 industrials (just to cover your empire with a factory and powerplant). So in that case, you want to settle at the best settling spots and hope those are as close as possible (3 tiles between cities, sometimes 4). This way you make the best use of the land that is available to you during the first 100 turns of the game. And make no mistake, the first 100 turns of the game are where 90% of the outcome is decided, even if the game lasts more than 200 turns.

If you want to play a 300 turn game, where you don't focus on winning, but on making a beautiful simcity empire full of wonders and strong in every aspect of the game, then you may want to settle as wide as you can without leaving gaps, sometimes maybe even leaving a gap where you can park a unit there to prevent enemy settlements.

If you play xCC (meaning you will only build x cities in the game, and x is a relatively low number, like 3 or 5) you want to give your few cities as much land each as possible.

If, on whatever difficulty you are playing, you are not yet certain you will win easilly when you start the game, you also settle close. Settling at max distance is very sub optimal and should only be done when you master the game to a degree where you know you can do it and maybe have set yourself extra limitations that make this more sensible. (as i indicated above)

The actual spot for the city (fresh water/coast; on top of luxes, on top of plain hills) is however more important than the overall layout. It is of course a compromise between these 2 factors, but i would never ever settle Radom where you did. (1 tile away from a river)

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

Depends on your goals.
If you are focusing on winning asap, you can expect to win somewhere between turn 100 and 200. The last 50 turns are not that important since there is little investment horizon remaining, so you want to have your cities to grow freely until turn 100 or so. (size 7ish) you also don't want a lot of districts because you only need those that support your victory condition as well as a few commercials, 1-2 industrials (just to cover your empire with a factory and powerplant). So in that case, you want to settle at the best settling spots and hope those are as close as possible (3 tiles between cities, sometimes 4). This way you make the best use of the land that is available to you during the first 100 turns of the game. And make no mistake, the first 100 turns of the game are where 90% of the outcome is decided, even if the game lasts more than 200 turns.

If you want to play a 300 turn game, where you don't focus on winning, but on making a beautiful simcity empire full of wonders and strong in every aspect of the game, then you may want to settle as wide as you can without leaving gaps, sometimes maybe even leaving a gap where you can park a unit there to prevent enemy settlements.

If you play xCC (meaning you will only build x cities in the game, and x is a relatively low number, like 3 or 5) you want to give your few cities as much land each as possible.

If, on whatever difficulty you are playing, you are not yet certain you will win easilly when you start the game, you also settle close. Settling at max distance is very sub optimal and should only be done when you master the game to a degree where you know you can do it and maybe have set yourself extra limitations that make this more sensible. (as i indicated above)

The actual spot for the city (fresh water/coast; on top of luxes, on top of plain hills) is however more important than the overall layout. It is of course a compromise between these 2 factors, but i would never ever settle Radom where you did. (1 tile away from a river)

Ain't Aqueduct good?
My first goal was to set the westernmost limit at what's now a campus of Novgorod. Too bad when i'm entered Middle Ages, India (under Chandragupta) did take Nov'd and emergency incurs. (I've already got a sizable troops stationed at the west end due to previous wars with both Persia (Attempted surprise invasion with footsloggers) and Russia (joined the war out of proper reasons beyond expoloiting the weaks)
While the Invasion was repelled, Russia sued for peace first (they got war with Jan kun)
While i was busy beating Emergency. Another one incurs. Did you see Radom? and Aachen added to the Empire? Freddy did invade Radom first and i've got emergency. he did take the city, also the Emergency targeted at him. And i've finished the first Emergency, returned Nov'd to Russia and bought a couple more crossbowmen with that reward worth of 6k. And began steamrollin' on Germany.
And finally i've took another city after Aachen. What will you do? take it, or raze it.

EDIT: This is TERRA style map

 

[WackenOpenAir]

Ain't Aqueduct good?

Aquaducts are good, i sometimes even build them when my city doesn't really need them, just for the 2 adjacency on my industrial complex (since that will be multiplied by 2 with a government policy and again by the coal powerplant)
It is however pretty terrible to need it on a city that has no water at all as you will need to build it in a tiny city that can't grow while building it.

Unless playing xCC, i don't raze cities, why would you ? A bad city is better than no city. (and building settlers gets too expensive after you had a bunch)

Finally reading your story, i have a little tip for you on politics:
It is fully in your hands if you will be at war or not. Every time you meet a civ, send a delegation on the turn you met them (they will always accept it on the first turn) and sell or give them open borders. That way you start with +6 of them liking you. That is enough to offset the negative first impressions even on deity. Maybe sometimes it is not or they immediately find another reason to be negative towards you. In that case send them ~ 150 gold or something of that value for another +10. This +10 decays over time, but it is generally enough to make them positive towards you within a few turns. As soon as they have a green smiley, declare friendship, this will again give you another +9 and they are likely to be your friends for the rest of the game. (if you don't forget to renew the friendship each 30 turns) An extra reason to do this is that you can then make alliances with your friends. This will provide you with 1 favor per turn, which you can sell to the AI for 7 gold. (used to be much more, but 5 alliances of 7gpt each is still quite worthy)
Except for the small gold cost (25 per delegation), there is no downside to it. As long as its just friendship and not an alliance, you can always end it and go to war when you want to.
I myself very rarely pay the 150 gold. having 5 alliances and 2 enemies is a perfectly good position to be in. (and often not hard to convince your allies to join the war against your enemies. i prefer to have the strongest civ's be my enemies so i can keep those in check a bit, either by my own forces, or by sending allies against them, just dont make really weak civs fight the strong one, or they will probably be conquered and just make the strong one even stronger.

 

[Victoria]

My preferred distance wavers between good placement for terrain and good placement for Coliseum.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

What's your preferred distances between cities, and boundary geometric patters you like to use?

As close as possible as you want as many cities as possible. But better distant spots Before closer spots.

 

[Spartacus73]

In general close is good, but I'll make a stretch for a strategic reason like resources, natural wonders, terrain (such as a bottle neck in the mountains that will prevent any civs entering into my region for a long time period), or location of neighbors and fighting forward settling and boxing me in. So a little situational.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

In general close is good, but I'll make a stretch for a strategic reason like resources, natural wonders, terrain (such as a bottle neck in the mountains that will prevent any civs entering into my region for a long time period), or location of neighbors and fighting forward settling and boxing me in. So a little situational.

Why closest to minimum mandatory distance is better? did two cities grow better when each respective city borders are in contact?

 

[WackenOpenAir]

Why closest to minimum mandatory distance is better? did two cities grow better when each respective city borders are in contact?

Close is better because:
-You don't have infinite space. When you settle closer, you often can settler more cities. More cities = more districts, more total citizens, more everything really. Oh and all without needing to scramble for housing. The investment to grow to size 6 is after all not half the investment of growing to size 12, but much less than half.
-Your settlers need to walk less far, meaning you settle a few turns earlier.
-Your cities can work together on adjacencies, both of districts and food triangles.
-Your empire is more compact and easier to defend.

On the other side of the equation is that wider placement allows your cities to grow larger. And that is virtually worthless because the later in the game, the less time there is to pay back any investments and this basically counts double. You make investments for your win condition (armies for domination, theatre squares and archeologists for culture etc) These type of investments made during the last 20 turns often have no value at all. After all, your armies that are produced in the last 20 turns will never reach the battle field, your archeologists will barely reach their destinations etc. So if you have a 180 turn games, after say turn 160, it is already not important what your cities are putting out. (It is often good to cut all your lumbermilled forests etc when you are nearing victory by say 20-30 turns or so and you may want to put them on starvation (of you can improve production output like that) even before then. You want to de-invest and pull out everything you can while it still matters. So that 180 turns game is reduced to 150 where your cities productivity is concerned. When making investments like citizens, the new citizen will probably be working a 5 food/production tile, 2 of which it eats itself, meaning a value of +3 (and a fraction of science and culture). Paying 100 food/production (not even counting the cost of housing/amenities) to gain 3 per turn, already needs 33 turns to pay back for itself. And if it does pay back in 33 turns, its actually a terrible investment because you are not gaining anything yet. In order for it to be a worthy investment, it needs to pay back those +3 for at very least 50ish turns. So that is why the ability to grow your cities beyond size 10 or whatever they are around turn 100-120 is rather worthless.

 

[tetley]

Interesting that people like multiple, close cities. My issues with too many cities have been: 1) the 4-city luxury limit, and 2) you multiply your war weariness over those cities. I like perpetual war, which I guess is a holdover from civ5 where I like to xp my double-shot crossbows every turn. Also I have been playing low sea level. There are whole swaths of land left unsettled to the end. I knew going into civ6 that I was going to have to shake civ5 out of my head.

 

[Victoria]

you multiply your war weariness over those cities

This seems incorrect to me, do you have a link to proof/investigations on this front? If you look at my WW link below you will see I have done a lot of testing on the subject and it is not based on the size of your empire.